(1954- ) US author and editor, married to author and editor Will Shetterly; she began as an author of fantasies, her first being "Rending Dark" (in Sword and Sorceress, anth 1984, ed Marion Zimmer Bradley), and her best known perhaps being her first novel, War for the Oaks (1987): this won a Locus Award as best debut novel. Her second novel, Falcon (1989), is a remarkably well-constructed sf tale whose protagonist moves from the Planetary-Romance setting of the first half of the book into the hi-tech Space-Opera environment that dominates the second, where he has become an ace Starship pilot; eventually everything fits together in an extremely well-ordered climax. The subtitle of her third novel, Bone Dance: A Fantasy for Technophiles (1991), neatly demonstrates the difficulty – it was not uncommon for writers of the 1980s to wrestle with the problem – of generic placement, though this particular book, which depicts a Post-Holocaust search for an ancient Weapon in Minneapolis, is sufficiently sf-like not to distress taxonomists. Finder: A Novel of the Borderlands (1994) is, however, a Fantasy novel tied to the Borderlands world; The Princess and the Lord of Night (1994) is a pictorial fantasy for children.

With Shetterly, Bull published a collection of stories (one collaborative), Double Feature (coll 1994), and edited the Liavek sequence of Shared-World fantasy anthologies, beginning with Liavek (anth 1985) and closing with Grand Festival (anth 1990). Freedom and Necessity (1997) with Steven Brust is a political adventure, with echoes of Alexandre Dumas and intimations of fantasy, set in mid-nineteenth-century Britain as the Chartist Movement began to exercise a real-life influence. [JC]

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We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →